Technology

Junior Developer '26

Nairobi
Work Type: Full Time

The Pesapal Junior Dev Challenge '26

We are looking for the most talented, young developers in the region. If you are a programmer and you love computing, Pesapal might be the place for you.

Thriving at Pesapal requires the ability to work under pressure, the will and the dedication and the capacity to grow constantly, the ingenuity to develop unorthodox solutions—in a word, you must be able to think for yourself.

Why a hard challenge?

Let’s face it: we’re living in an AI dominated world, so it’s easy for anyone to answer a bunch of stock questions. So we pose a hard challenge in order to give you the chance to show how much you know and how driven you are.

We want our selection process to be as objective as possible. We don’t care about your credentials or experience.

We also want to make the application process win-win for everyone who attempts it. The problems is interesting enough that even if you don’t get the role this time, you will still build something cool that you can learn from and use to build up your public portfolio (e.g. on GitHub).

The challenge

Design and implement a simple relational database management system (RDBMS). There should be support for declaring tables with a few column data types, CRUD operations, basic indexing and primary and unique keying and some joining. The interface should be SQL or something similar, and it should have an interactive REPL mode.


Demonstrate the use of your RDBMS by writing a trivial web app that requires CRUD to the DB.


We don’t care what languages or tools you use (and that includes AI). We do care that you give credit where it is due, so don’t borrow someone else’s work without saying so. But keep in mind that the whole point of the challenge is for you to showcase what you know and what you can do.

A word of encouragement

If you are daunted by the above challenge, realise that we are not as interested in perfect solutions as we are in clear thinking and evidence of determination. Give the challenge your best attempt, learn, document, and you can still impress us.

Submitting

If you are interested in the role, put your attempt in a publicly-accessible repo (on GitHub or equivalent). Hit “Apply Now” and link your repo in the form beneath, upload your CV, and submit before 23:59:59 EAT on 17th January 2026.


If you find the challenge uninteresting, or too similar to a past project that you’ve done, email us with a subject like “Suggested Problem for JDEV26” and your suggestion by Monday night (12th), and we will consider it. Note, however, that it should be a problem of comparable difficulty.


If anything in this job prompt is unclear, feel free to reach us [email protected].

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